Posted on 10/03/2016 3:51:31 PM PDT by Sean_Anthony
The entire genre is a fraud, and deserves to be called out as such
The worst thing about a presidential campaign year - and Lord knows there are many contenders for that dishonor - may not be the terrible ads or the awful debates. The worst thing in my view is the growing prominence of the media “fact-check” genre of journalism. If you ever engage in online discussions about politics, I’m sure you’ve seen it. Person A makes an assertion about something. Person B responds not by saying anything at all, but by posting a link to a media “fact-check” site that presumes to disprove or debunk Person A’s assertion.
And that is supposed to settle it, because these media fact-checkers are nonpartisan, unbiased and unfailingly factual in their assessments. When they issue a “ruling” of true, half-true, false, pants-on-fire or whatever else, you can consider that ruling tantamount to absolute truth. They’re fact-checkers, dammit!
“Truth” and “fact” have as many definitions as “is” for the left. Something can be “fake but accurate” and still a “true” “fact”. Something can be decided in court settlements to have happened but still be “untrue” (e.g. “Bill sexually assaulting women”)
No reason to debate the accuracy of “fact-checkers” until there is an agreement on the word “fact”. Most of the “fact-checkers” come from the Dan Rather School of Journalism where the motto is “Fake But Accurate”. So you need to give up the “old and outdated” definition of “fact” to enter the debate on “fact-checking”.
The most absurd category of fact checking is when a statement about the future. How is it possible to fact check a statement about the future.
A candidate says the country will be X in 5 years if we don’t change course. I will do Y if I am elected.
That Fact checkers then rate those statements proves that the fact checkers are frauds. Find fact checkers who stick to statements about the past and I’ll respect them just for that.
Be sure to label them correctly.
They're "journobloggers" or "videobloggers".
If we stop calling them "journalists" or "reporters", it WILL get on their last nerve.
They blog for places like Bezos' Blog [WP], Sulzberger's Blog [NYT], or any of the network videoblogs.
I was working up a list of the network videoblogs, as related to their ownership, but I haven't finished it yet. :)
“fact check” is nothing different from claiming that journalists uniquely are “objective.” Journalism is negative, because bad news sells. Journalists know that. Therefore when journalists claim that journalists are objective, they are asserting that negativity is objectivity.Whatever else may be said, that conceit is patently cynical. Cynicism being the opposite of faith, there can be no question of journalism being simpatico with Christianity. And no reason why a journalist would disagree with a socialist.
I'm beginning to think that mocking them as "bloggers", and their "news" organizations as "blogs" to their faces might ruffle more than a few feathers in the Guild.
It seems as though you may be able to get at them on Twitter, as I posted earlier today:
The War On Twitter: You Can Make A Difference
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3476319/posts
My take, as you may know, is that journalism is like a fast middle linebacker - if you try to run away from him, you have to deal with the other part of the defense where you are running and you still have to deal with that star linebacker too - he’ll catch up with the play anyway. Your only option is to run at him, because the rest of the defense isn’t as good at helping him as he is at helping the others.So, yes - we need to delegitimate their pretensions. And the only question is how to do it. Sorta like, “How do you bell the cat?” Because they do “buy ink by the carload.” Absent a Trump victory, the long run looks pretty dreary. But given an honest SCOTUS, we might be able to sue the miscreants - by which I mean the monopoly known as the AP, and the FCC (which renews licenses of broadcasters on the pretext that they are “broadcasting in the public interest” - when what they are doing in their “objective” reporting is patently tendentious). And also the FEC, because without the pretext that journalism is objective, either news would have to be regulated just like (other) political advertising - or else we must go back to the First Amendment, properly understood. That is, freedom of the press is freedom of everyone, without exception to spend their own money on a “press” (i.e., on technical means of propagating opinion).
I think that “journalist” or “reporter” is the same as “speaker” - we all have mouths to talk with, and - in the Internet era - we “all” have equipment which enables us to make our opinions accessible worldwide. We can’t force people to pay attention to us, but we can get our opinions “out there.”
But, of course, you and I do not have “freedom of the press” on FR. Jim Robinson does, and he exercises it by allowing us to post - or by taking posts down if it suits him. We are like reporters, whose freedom of the press is limited by the editor and publisher who do, or do not, print his stuff. And it’s not that we should tear reporters down, it’s that we should elevate respect for our own writing. One way to do which is to demonstrate that our writing here is actually less tendentious than the ever-so-objective wire service reporter. It actually is, you know. Journalism is systematically negative towards American society. We aren’t.
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